ASTI’s latest data collection and analysis from Africa south of the Sahara (SSA) exposes a persistent problem and a drag on sustainable development efforts: Growth in research spending is lower than for other kinds of agricultural investment.

Why is this happening, and can anything be done to reverse this imbalance?

Under the 2003 Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), countries committed to spend at least 10 percent of their budgets on agriculture, with the goal of achieving 6 percent annual growth in their agricultural sectors. In 2014 in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, heads of state reaffirmed their support and confirmed that additional investment was needed to meet this target.

The good news is that substantial progress has been made towards these goals.

After a long period of neglect, SSA governments on average more than doubled their investments in inflation-adjusted terms during 2000-2014. Many SSA countries ramped up investments in areas such as farm support and subsidies, training, irrigation, and extension. However, growth in agricultural research investments fell behind.

There is well-documented evidence that agricultural research investments in SSA offer high returns compared with investments in other agricultural inputs. So why aren’t African countries investing more in an area that would both benefit their economies, and help them reach their CAADP growth targets?

Lag time. The returns to investment in agricultural research are substantial, but are realized in the longer-term. Policy makers have more incentive to steer investments towards areas where they can show constituents results within the time frame of their terms of office.

Farmers lack political clout. Though they are the main beneficiaries of agricultural research, farmers are not in an ideal situation to advocate for increased spending. Although smallholder farmers constitute a significant share of Africa’s population, they are widely dispersed. Many also lack the social, economic, and educational resources to engage in collective action to effect policy change.

Donors rank other goals higher. Since the 1990s, donor priorities have focused on structural adjustment reform and privatizing public activities, which diverted funding from agricultural research.

Government research budgets focus on the short-term. A country’s budget process itself can be a barrier to the funding of agricultural research agencies. Rather than determining budgets based on a thorough assessment of a country’s long-term research needs, governments often allocate funds on a fixed, incremental schedule.

So what can be done? Raising awareness of these political roadblocks is the first step. Another task for policy makers and research agency leaders is to diversify their funding sources, to avoid over-reliance on donors. Some research agencies, for example, have been able to raise funds from the sale of goods and services, taxes on commodities, or private sector investment. These sources will differ by country, but the importance of including research in the agricultural investment mix holds true for all countries in SSA, especially as they strive to reduce poverty and hunger through their CAADP investment commitments.

See more findings and analysis of research investments in SSA in the full report.

This new report—and related data and analysis—finds that, although SSA countries have made progress honoring regionwide commitments to agricultural support such as outlined in the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), growth in agricultural research investments has lagged considerably behind spending on other agricultural areas, such as farm support, subsidies, and irrigation.

The data cover key indicators on agricultural research investments, human resource capacity, and research outputs in the region. The report highlights various challenges:

Agricultural research spending and human resource capacity both grew in SSA as a whole during 2000–2014, but results were uneven.

Underinvestment in agricultural research continued and many countries remained dependent on volatile donor funding.

In a large number of countries, a high proportion of agricultural researchers qualified to the PhD-level is approaching retirement age. This, combined with high shares of more recently recruited junior staff, could result in significant knowledge gaps and jeopardize future research outputs.

Outdated research facilities and equipment are impeding the conduct of productive research.

Taking into account these challenges, the report outlines a number of policy implications for SSA governments.

ASTI analysis has also resulted in new national spending targets for agricultural research, based on characteristics of each country’s economy and agricultural sector. The report finds that certain countries are close to their attainable investment levels, while others have the potential to invest much more.

Modernizing the agricultural sector is a key task in developing Asia, in particular for low income countries according to the “Key Indicators for the Asia and Pacific 2013” report by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). To follow in the path of high-income countries in the region, agricultural research and development (R&D) investment will be necessary to bring about the technological innovation needed for this modernization. The new regional synthesis report “Benchmarking Agricultural Research Indicators across Asia–Pacific” published by ASTI and APAARI presents the most recent data available on agricultural R&D in the region, laying out a baseline by which to measure future progress.

The Asia–Pacific region has increasingly raised the profile of its contribution to global agricultural R&D. In 2008, $0.40 of every dollar spent on public agricultural R&D worldwide targeted the countries of this region. Total public agricultural R&D spending in Asia–Pacific increased by 50 percent since 1996 to $12.3 billion in 2008. Most of this growth was driven by the region’s low- and middle-income countries, whereas growth in the region’s high-income countries stagnated. In fact, growth in public agricultural R&D spending in the region’s low- and middle-income countries has outpaced growth in all other developing regions around the world since the 1980s. China and India accounted for almost all of this growth which is a reflection of the strong support of their governments to public agricultural R&D acknowledging its important role in driving agricultural growth.

Aside from increased spending, most low- and middle-income countries in the region have also made considerable progress in building human resource capacity in agricultural R&D. With a few exceptions, the number of scientists employed in most countries across the region has increased, and in all the sample countries scientists’ qualification levels have improved since the 1990s.

This development is notable given the widespread challenges that these agencies face, including attracting and maintaining a pool of well-qualified research staff, and dealing with disproportionate numbers of either aging, senior staff, or junior, inexperienced staff. Some countries with a history of political isolation (notably Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Vietnam) still have very low numbers of PhD-qualified staff, forming a significant impediment to advancing the quality of research.

Despite these positive developments, agricultural R&D spending as a share of agricultural output in Asia–Pacific is lagging behind other regions of the developing world. In 2008, of the 13 low- and middle-income countries for which detailed spending data were available, Malaysia was the only country investing more than 1 percent of its agricultural GDP in agricultural research. Even though intensity ratios do not take into account the policy and institutional environment within which agricultural research takes place or the broader size and structure of a country’s agricultural sector and economy, these low ratios are a clear sign of underinvestment in agricultural R&D.

If Asia–Pacific is to meet its agricultural, economic, and emerging challenges, including rapid population growth, climate change, environmental degradation, and food price volatility, levels of investment in agricultural R&D must increase. In addition, such investments will need to be better managed, timed, and targeted to ensure maximum impact on productivity growth and poverty reduction. The private sector, for example, is still an untapped resource in many of the region’s countries.

Simply put: Supporting policy reforms offer further potential to ensure that the benefits of agricultural R&D translates into future results.